


echoes of a city long overgrown

by scribblscrabbl



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, Inception Reverse Big Bang Challenge 2015, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-11
Updated: 2015-10-11
Packaged: 2018-04-25 18:15:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,089
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4971313
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scribblscrabbl/pseuds/scribblscrabbl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Beyond the shore it’s flat as far as the eye can see. The sky doesn’t so much slope as it stretches without waiting for the ground to catch up. It’s a living canvas, blank, terrifying, </i>freeing<i>. </i></p><p><i>Eames laughs and Mal – Mal flings her arms out wide in rapture and begins to paint.</i><br/> </p><p>It wasn't Dom who went down to Limbo with Mal. It was Eames.</p>
            </blockquote>





	echoes of a city long overgrown

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [roads like wine, and desires like water](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4971214) by [beili](https://archiveofourown.org/users/beili/pseuds/beili). 



> Written for Inception Reverse Bang 2015 and beili's stunning, stunning art. So much gratitude goes to her for throwing ideas around with me at the beginning WITH SO MUCH CAPSLOCK INVOLVED and for being so encouraging and enthusiastic every time I sent her an update.
> 
> And thank you a million times over to kate_the_reader for being so generous as to take on both my IRB fics. For never failing to be on the same page with me and just being there every step of the way. <3
> 
> As a final note, I should probably say that while I wouldn't label this piece as angst, there is nothing fluffy about it. The issues of grief and regret are front and center, and neither is ever easy. But I promise you now that there will be catharsis and lots of it. Basically, the entire thing is my self-indulgent reimagining of the movie in which I change everything I don't like about it and roll around in all my Mal feels. (Omg, I ramble so much in my author's notes. THANK YOU FOR READING GOODBYE.)

“You’re thinking a dream within a dream? Two levels.”

Eames stands at the edge of Yusuf’s dream den pressing his poker chip into the curve of his thumb, eyes following the IV drip down its line to the woman’s wrist, all skin and bones, starved by time and regrets. The last bit’s just a theory, but he can’t imagine why else they come if it isn’t to escape the sad, irredeemable state of their realities.

Then he looks at Yusuf, shaking his head. “Three.”

Yusuf, in the middle of adjusting the drip, is sufficiently alarmed to stop what he’s doing and stare at Eames. “Bloody hell, what kind of job is this?”

Eames pulls his poker chip to his palm and squeezes, feeling a sharp flare of irritation. It’s rich coming from Yusuf, making Eames sound suicidal when he’s the one mixing cocktails with enough juice to stun a bloody elephant.

“Inception,” Eames says, because there’s no point in beating about the bush. Yusuf’s the only chemist he trusts with his life. His money, even, if it comes to that.

“That’s – ”

“It’s perfectly possible,” he interrupts, “it’s just bloody difficult, so I need you to have my back.”

Yusuf pulls off his glasses and wipes them on his kurta-shirt, which means he’s relenting; he’s just taking his sweet time doing it.

“Must be some payout,” he finally says, voice casual but eyes intent, too shrewd for comfort.

Eames chooses to let him come to his own conclusions about what’s on the table and keeps his mouth shut.

A beat later Yusuf lets that one slide, only to add, “You’ll need a good point man. A really good one.”

If Eames had anticipated anything, he’d anticipated this, and it still comes at him like a hot blade too quick to parry.

“I need you in the field,” he says tightly, shoving fists into his pockets, patience wearing thin. These days he’s quicker to anger, short on damn near everything that would make him less of a bastard to work with. But needs must and all that. “I’ll double your share.”

Yusuf crosses his arms and leans against the next cot over, empty and stripped of its sheets. “I’ll need a few days to cook something up.”

“Make it twenty-four hours,” Eames says, throwing down a plane ticket. “Our flight leaves at 8am.”

*

_Limbo is nothing like they expected, and everything. The water that washes them up to shore isn’t salty or briny. It’s bright on their tongues and sweet, sweeter than any water Eames has ever tasted, as if he’s just traversed a wasteland and this is the oasis at the end of it._

_Beyond the shore it’s flat as far as the eye can see. The sky doesn’t so much slope as it stretches without waiting for the ground to catch up. It’s a living canvas, blank, terrifying,_ freeing _._

_Eames laughs and Mal – Mal flings her arms out wide in rapture and begins to paint._

*

“I’m out. Try Laslov, I hear she’s in between jobs.” Arthur tucks the phone against his shoulder to push up the window, muscles sighing at the summer breeze that floats through. He’s spent plenty of winters in tropical climates but it never gets old. Must be the first 19 he spent knee-deep in snow, blowing his breaths into the air like smoke. He figures it’s in his blood.

“Ariadne’s the architect,” Yusuf adds like that’ll sweeten the deal, knowing her name’s one of three to consistently make Arthur’s short list of people he trusts to not professionally fuck him over. As for personally – it’s anyone’s guess, and he likes keeping it that way.

“You, Ariadne, me,” he ticks off, eyes narrowing because the last time they teamed up was in Tangier, and Tangier was –, “who’s the extractor?”

He already knows but he wants Yusuf to say it, to hear loud and clear what he’s asking Arthur to walk into like it won’t cost him a thing, like they didn’t all crawl out of that train wreck of a job checking their totems over and over again with bile burning a hole in their throats.

“Arthur – ”

“Who’s – the – extractor,” Arthur spits out.

“Eames. It’s Eames, all right?” Yusuf says in surrender. “I was working my way up to telling you. He’s in bloody dire straits, Arthur, I wouldn’t have called if he wasn’t. I wouldn’t have agreed to the fucking job if he wasn’t. You know how much I value my own skin.”

Arthur closes his eyes and rubs a palm along his neck, heart rattling like it’s running on half-empty, but he doesn’t hang up.

“He’s in deep with Cobol.” Arthur knows. Arthur’s been keeping tabs – he considers it exercising his due diligence – but he refrains from commenting. “He fucked up and I don’t know how. All I know is Cobol’s mark turned the tables and hired him for a different job. Promised to make all his problems go away is my guess.”

They could stand around all day enumerating those, most of which Eames wears like extra layers that keep him warm at night, but they both know there’s one he could do with shaking off.

“What’s the job?” Arthur asks, purely out of curiosity.

Yusuf pauses before replying, “Inception.”

Arthur frowns and sits on the edge of the bed shoved into the corner of the pill-box apartment. “Inception? That’s impossible.”

Yusuf snorts. “It’s perfectly possible, it’s just bloody difficult. His words not mine. He said it’ll take three levels to get the job done.”

At which point Yusuf starts rambling about sedatives and Arthur tunes him out, clutching his head in one hand, thoughts racing so fast his lungs can barely keep up. Three levels. He only knows two people who’ve navigated a three-level dream without the entire thing collapsing like a house of cards, and one of them is dead.

“We’re working out of Sydney,” Yusuf is saying when Arthur checks in again. “Flight leaves in the morning at 8 – ”

“I can’t,” Arthur says suddenly, standing and walking to the window again, yanking on the blinds. “Laslov. She’s partial to difficult jobs.”

“Damn it, Arthur,” Yusuf starts, voice rising in frustration.

“I have every right to walk away and you know it,” Arthur says evenly, resting his knuckles against the windowpane, thinking it would be easy to pull his arm back and _release_. “You and Ariadne should think long and hard about what you’re signing up for. I’m burning this number so don’t try calling it again.”

He hangs up and stares out the window at Nairobi, shimmering under its summer sun.

*

 _It’s not that Arthur lacks imagination; he’s just a creature of habit. He likes things the way they are, the cyclicality, the certainty. He likes delineations, boundaries, a well-timed kick. But Mal has patience for none of these things, and Eames is no better. Together, they pull Arthur through dreams so lush and fragrant he’s queasy by the time they run out of breath, sprawled on their backs asking him to imagine more, wider,_ deeper _._

_Part of him is enamored, and the other part – small enough to ignore – is fearful, because this Mal feels too wild, too extraordinary to fit into the life she’s chosen. This Mal makes Eames laugh beautifully from his belly, sounding ten years younger and out of Arthur’s reach._

_But when they curl towards him on either side, bodies warm and possessive, telling him that this, this is a sure thing, he lets himself dream._

*

“With all due respect, Mr. Saito,” Eames’s voice is tight and Saito’s eyebrows raised delicately like he doesn’t buy the diplomacy for a second, “this isn’t your run-of-the-mill extraction, this is inception. There’s no room for tourists.”

They’re sat on a rooftop in Mombasa’s Old Town drinking in a generous panorama that extends all the way to the water. The sun’s starting to wane, casting drowsy, muted light across rust-stained rooftops.

Eames balances his poker chip on his knuckles and meets Saito’s assessing stare. He learned long ago the value of taking a hard line when it comes to clients who fancy themselves natural-born criminals or think dreamshare is a fucking joyride that’ll let them off whenever they damn well please.

“The welfare of many is at stake, Mr. Eames,” Saito reminds him. “How will I know you’ve done your job?”

“We’ll both have to take a leap of faith then, won’t we?” Eames says evenly. “No one else is crazy enough to take this job, but I think you already know that.” He pauses, then adds because Saito’s probably the kind of man he’d have a drink with if circumstances were kinder, “Anything and everything can go wrong in a three-level dream. I think it’s in both our interests that your mind stays fully intact.”

Saito considers the proposition with a flawless poker face before remarking by way of a concession, “I take it you speak from experience. Should I find that concerning or comforting?”

Eames feels his mouth twitch of its own aggravating volition, a shade of a smile that, if Saito had an eye for detail, would tell him the answer, the real answer, is neither and both, and everything in between – long and arduous, and mired in grief.

“Would it sway you one way or the other?” Eames temporizes when he finds his breath.

“No, I suppose not,” Saito says after a moment, casting his eyes down briefly in apology, as if he sees the line he’s treading, thin in the earth but deep and savage. “It would reassure me, however, if you chose your people more wisely this time.”

“I’ve brought on the best,” Eames lies easily.

*

_For the first two months they spoil themselves, and each other. They don’t build cities, they build empires, gleaming meccas they traverse on foot until their exhaustion is a pleasurable bone-deep ache and they take trains that cut through the landscape without a sound. They fling themselves across space and time – Paris’s Belle Époque shoulder to shoulder with Hong Kong’s postmodernism. Montmartre sloping down to the dazzle of the Moulin Rouge before melding with the iridescent fog clinging to Victoria Harbor._

_For the next six, the infatuation settles into contentment. They stay in Paris, and it’s the Paris Mal knew as a little girl scampering along the ledge of the Canal St. Martin and smelling the books in the Latin Quarter. Eames paints originals not caring if they’re shit, Mal smokes too much, and they get pissed on expensive wine sprawled on the Champ-de-Mars until the lights of the Eiffel Tower blur like they’ve been plunged into the Seine._

_And some nights, long past dusk, Eames finds Mal on the rooftop dangling her legs over the edge because she’s become fond of telling him she’ll get plenty of sleep when she’s dead – right now is the time to_ live.

*

Arthur spends the next 20 minutes picking glass out of his knuckles, one jagged little shard for every reason why he should stay put. Or, better yet, go to Michigan like he’d planned before taking this crackpot detour. The equatorial heat’s never really suited him, besides. It makes him feel slow-limbed and hazy, like he’s covered in the thin film of a dream he can’t peel off.

Two hours later he charters a plane to take him the exact opposite direction, thinking he should’ve learned by now that when it comes to Eames, nothing ever goes according to the goddamn plan.

He starts his search in Old Town and that’s where he finds the gambling den, with his broken Swahili, but mostly with the 78 Euros he has when he empties his pockets, his watch, and the phone he told Yusuf he’d burn.

Of course it’s a fucking gambling den, floor littered with peanut shells, air pungent with the smell of cigars – cheap imports with flashy wrappers – replete with the kind of people who specialize in cheating you with one hand and pick-pocketing you with the other. Eames would say they’re his kind of people. Eames, who’s hunched over a game of blackjack so Arthur can only see his profile, the distinct slope of his nose, the day-old stubble, and it’s enough, enough to knock his legs out from under him then kick him when he’s down until he’s wheezing a little, dizzy from being split wide open.

He presses his palm against the wall and takes a step back, pulling his hat down and squeezing his eyes shut, trying to remember how many months it’s been since Tangier. Eight – eight and a half. It should feel like a gulf, continents wide, except, with Eames here, _here_ , unrecognizable and still unchanged, Arthur loses his grip on the physics of it all. The timeline condenses, caves until all the pieces are stacked on top of each other – Mal’s effervescence, her affection, her moods, increasingly mercurial, Eames’s brazen charm, his weakness for beautiful things, for Mal. Then a swift, sudden loss, a black hole bored straight through the middle with a vengeance Arthur didn’t see coming. Eames pale, drawn, running hot and cold, shutting Arthur out like Mal was never his, only borrowed, like he was a bystander on the fringe of a train wreck who’d have no trouble walking away.

Arthur’s hand twitches, knuckles itching under the bandage, and just as he thinks for the tenth time in as many hours that he shouldn’t have gone down this road, Eames turns. Eames turns and looks straight at him like he’s a sucker for thinking he could fool a man who fools people for a living.

And even from here Eames looks fucking wrecked, the whole of him marked up and down with the kind of grief that can’t be spoken for fear of the ground heaving open and the sky falling in. It makes Arthur plunge his broken hand into his pocket as he takes three brisk strides to the bar, pulling out his die and rolling it against the bar top, once, twice, then a third time before he hears Eames behind him saying his name.

*

_“It’s the perfect opportunity, Arthur, what’s the sense in letting it pass you by?” Mal sighs at him as they watch Philippa sit on the lush grass without a sound, immersed in her picture book, curls elegant like her mother’s, mouth solemn like Dom’s._

_“I don’t think Eames would appreciate being called an opportunity,” Arthur says dryly._

_Mal snorts delicately. “Eames is a shameless opportunist, he’d be delighted. Besides,” her mouth twitches, “I’m pretty sure he’d let you call him anything you want.”_

_“They say children learn unconsciously from their surroundings,” he says primly._

_“Oh, don’t be such a stick-in-the-mud, it’s not becoming,” Mal rolls her eyes, voice tinged with impatience. “Yours could be a grand romance if you just let it.”_

_The instinctive search for a love story is utterly Mal, and Arthur would chalk up the aggressive matchmaking to her incorrigibly French sensibilities if he didn’t sense something else, something restive and a little frantic pulling her away from him, from the house, from Philippa and Dom, like today’s one of those days when she doesn’t have the heart to stay._

*

Eames picked out Arthur the minute he walked in, just like he knew the man nursing his beer at the bar was there to discreetly blow Eames’s brains out. Except Cobol’s hired gun might as well have a sign plastered to his forehead, while Arthur – Arthur’s always been a singular case. Eames would recognize those shoulders anywhere, clad in anything, the stiff carriage that feels military even though Arthur doesn’t have a shred of patriotism in him, the way he wears his skin like he’s learned the hard way to not answer to anyone but himself.

Eames had been ready to play the ignorance card, wait it out because he reckoned it was either curiosity or coincidence, and both would’ve resolved themselves neatly, quietly. But he waited and Arthur had stayed put, and now he’s standing in front of Arthur without having once checked his totem. Because if this were a dream Arthur would’ve likely torn him limb from limb by now, rage a carbon copy of Mal’s, perfectly cruel and terrifyingly lovely.

This Arthur is neither of those things. This Arthur is brittle at the edges, hot at the core, mouth tight with hurt hemmed in by instinct and sheer force of will. This Arthur is dressed sloppily in a checked shirt and threadbare sandals, hair too long around his ears, skin too dark around his eyes – so fucking unbearably beautiful Eames wonders distantly how his subconscious got it so wrong.

Arthur’s die rests on the bar top, an ingenious little truth-telling machine, and after eight and a half months of silence, of penitence and cowardice, Eames says, “You look like you need a drink.”

They sit at a table on the terrace, turned for a minute to the last vestiges of dusk illuminating the labyrinthine streets down below, the thinning pedestrian traffic, the vendors packing up their spices, leaving aromas that linger long past nightfall.

“Inception,” Arthur finally says flatly. “Why did you tell Saito you could pull it off?”

“What makes you think I can’t?” Eames says evenly before taking a swig of his beer, tasting that special blend of piss and imperialism.

“Does this have something to do with what happened down there with Mal?”

Arthur’s watching Eames, eyes neatly shuttered but hand tight around his beer bottle, like maybe if he were a less patient man, he’d have that hand around Eames’s throat instead, choking the truth out of him. And it’s what makes him sicker to his stomach than cruel, lovely Arthur stabbing him in the kidney with a screwdriver, because this Arthur would do nothing of the sort if the truth got out. This Arthur would sit there quietly accusing, looking wretched and disappointed and heartbroken.

“Saito made a generous offer,” Eames deflects. “And given the position I’m in, you can hardly expect me to be choosy.”

Arthur’s hand twitches. “You had no right dragging Ariadne into this.”

Eames makes a mental note to have words with Yusuf about his meddling in affairs he should steer clear of if he knows what’s good for him.

Then he drawls, “I didn’t drag anyone anywhere,” if only to rile Arthur – at the very least make him take off that bloody hat because it looks entirely wrong on him, “I’ll have you know I was exceedingly civil. And, technically, she hasn’t agreed to it yet.”

Arthur clenches and unclenches his jaw before saying, “You’re gonna need someone running point. Someone ironing out the details so you don’t get blindsided by something incredibly fucking stupid. Someone like – ”

“You?” Eames finishes at the risk of making Arthur run like hell the other way, thinking if he were less of a selfish bastard, he’d make sure Arthur does exactly that.

Arthur falls silent, thumb picking at the label on his beer bottle. A minute ticks by, then two, and Eames looks to his left at the card tables, thinking they would’ve cleaned the place out, the two of them, in their heyday when Arthur was still dazzled by the life he’d fallen into, still drunk on it, and Mal had told him that was how it should be, always.

“Have you talked to Dom?” Arthur suddenly asks, as if he’s arrived at the question spontaneously despite not having a spontaneous bone in his body.

Eames takes another long pull of his beer. “No. I assume he wants nothing to do with me, and, for once, I can’t blame him. Miles lets me talk to the kids sometimes.”

Arthur shakes his head, throat working around something he can’t choke up or swallow down, and Eames knows how that goes. “He doesn’t hate you. He just – ”

“Can’t stand the sight of me? Wishes I could take Mal’s place?” Eames bites out, fucking exasperated more than anything because, call him callous, he’s not in search for reconciliation or a way to return things to the way they were. For all Arthur purports to be a realist, he is, at the heart of him, a bloody insufferable romantic.

Arthur falls silent and Eames is about to ask him why he’s not in Michigan, why he’s instead taken an 8,000-mile detour to a place that suits him as well as a nude beach known for its conga lines, when he says, “I fucking hate flying to Australia.”

Then he looks at Eames, teeth tugging just once at his lower lip – about as fidgety as he ever gets – like he’s suddenly not sure if Eames even wants him. And Eames thinks it’s one of the hardest things he’s ever had to do, sit here and not yank Arthur over the table, crush their mouths, their bones together, so he knows there will never be a time when Eames won’t want him.

“Should I read this as tacit permission to ply you with alcohol?” Eames smirks instead.

Arthur crosses his arms over his chest before nodding discreetly at the bar.

“We’ll have to lose your tail first.”

“Just like old times,” Eames says, unthinking, as he’s peering over the balcony to judge the fall.

Arthur swallows before saying, “You first.”

*

_Some people would call it playing God. Eames calls it art. A fanciful, arguably irreverent reworking of the world to suit their lavish aesthetics. Mal calls it _la vie en rose_ and waltzes, sometimes with Eames, sometimes alone, to the clear sweet sound of her beloved Édith blowing in on the wind._

_Mal creates for herself, for a past self she stuck in a shallow grave when life told her to move on. Turns out she never did give up the ghost, and, here, Mal resurrects her, nourishes her like she’s been mourning her all along._

_The lie Eames tells is that he creates for no one. In truth, he does it all for Arthur. He thinks that next time, he’ll bring Arthur so he can hand him beauty on a silver platter, its corners folded in neatly just the way he likes it._

*

Arthur meets Saito on the tarmac as they wait to board their private jet, deciding immediately that he likes what he sees – the exquisite cut of Saito’s double-breasted jacket, the shrewd eyes, the neat quirk of his mouth, all of it suggesting he’s the kind of man who never does anything by halves.

“Eames tells me you’re the best,” Saito says by way of a greeting. “My sources seem to agree.”

Arthur watches Eames follow Yusuf up the airstair and onto the plane, jacket slung impatiently over his shoulder, probably already pulling out all the stops to woo their unsuspecting flight attendant.

“Do you trust your sources, Mr. Saito?”

Saito’s eyebrows twitch in surprise before he recovers flawlessly, but Arthur’s long made it his business to not miss a thing.

“Are you suggesting your extractor isn’t trustworthy?”

Arthur shrugs, then smiles to let Saito know it’s not personal, it’s reputation. “He wouldn’t be a very good criminal if he was.”

They each get their own corner of the plane with room enough for Yusuf to prop up his feet and Arthur to spread out his files in a semi-circle around his laptop, five neat piles with zero overlap. Eames took enough Ambien with his vodka tonic to knock himself out by take-off, not because he’s afraid of flying but because he hates it – hates the monotony, the isolation, the cramped quarters – and because he can’t fucking sit still for more than five goddamn minutes. So Arthur throws him a scorching glare but lets him sleep, knowing this way he’ll at least be able to work without having to hear Eames gripe and moan like an six-year-old on the first leg of a road trip making his parents slowly lose their fucking minds.

Arthur opens the first file on Robert Fischer, feeling a thrill shoot down his spine, sharp and sweet, because, who is he kidding, he lives for jobs like this – pieces strewn in an impossible mess demanding a dizzying feat of engineering to construct a whole. Except it’s not just about coherency with him and Eames, never with them; it’s about _genius_.

Two hours later he’s popping aspirin and thinking he should’ve become an accountant. He pinches the bridge of his nose before doing a visual sweep of his surroundings. Yusuf’s snoring lightly, Saito arranged neatly even in slumber, and Eames – Eames is slouched halfway down his seat, limbs loose and splayed, mouth opened, neck scrunched, the sloppiest sleeper Arthur’s ever known, and for a second he loses track of his breath, heart knocking hard and fast against the recollection of Eames in bed, hogging space and heat and _Arthur_ , body relentlessly, instinctively possessive.

Then Arthur flings his pen at Eames with force and unparalleled precision, hitting Eames squarely on the forehead, making him jerk awake and reach for a gun that’s not there.

“Bloody hell,” he slurs, remembering where he is, eyes sliding to Arthur, voice low and rough with sleep. “What was that for?”

Arthur twitches in his seat, feels something – dark and needy – simmer in his gut.

“You’re a fucking maniac, you know that?” he hisses. “And give me back my fucking pen.”

Eames snatches it up from the floor and palms it. “It’s a Montblanc. I love Montblancs. It’ll look smashing with my green tie, don’t you think?”

Arthur grits his teeth. “Did you even skim Fischer’s files before you took this job? There is literally nothing in them we can use to convince him that breaking up the company is a good idea. No financial incentive whatsoever, and no political motivations.”

“Of course I didn’t read the files,” Eames says easily, “because the idea we’re going to plant in Fischer’s head won’t be a business strategy.”

Arthur stares at Eames, then crosses his arms over his chest. “Okay, if _I will split up my father’s empire_ isn’t a business strategy, then what is it?”

There’s silence and then – a small, hideous twist of Eames’s mouth, gone before Arthur can blink.

“An emotional response to his father’s death.”

Arthur slumps a little, looking away and out the window, turning the words over in his head, the groaning weight of them telling him what Eames has learned over the years – that loss can be violent and it can be hushed, but it never leaves you the same.

“Well, whatever the idea is, we won’t have much time,” Arthur says, turning back. “Fischer’s subconscious is militarized.”

Eames lets out a low, irate hum, then rubs tiredly at his jaw, looking like he hasn’t slept – truly slept with nothing hounding him, running him down hard – in months.

“Not surprising given his position, and his wealth.” Then he adds as an afterthought, “At least Ariadne will get to build some proper mazes.”

Ariadne, it turns out, takes it all in stride, better than any of them.

“There’s no sense in crying over spilled milk, right?” she shrugs, and Arthur concedes it’s a fair point. “At least we’ll be prepared going in. We’ve dealt with sub-security before.”

“Not with three levels, you haven’t,” Yusuf says helpfully, reclining in one of the neon-striped lawn chairs he got delivered to the warehouse to ‘cheer the place up.’

Arthur twirls his Montblanc with one hand, gripping his Moleskine with the other, elbows on his knees. “We’ll just have to move fast. We come up with a clean plan and we stick to it.”

“Saito’s arranged for me to spend a few days at Fischer-Morrow so I can study Fischer and Fischer’s godfather,” Eames says, slouched and spinning from side to side in his plush office chair. Arthur clamps down on the urge to stick out a foot and make him stay fucking _still_. “I suspect Browning’s our best bet to nudge Fischer’s subconscious in the direction we want it to go.”

“My father accepts that I want to create for myself, not follow in his footsteps,” Ariadne recaps.

Eames nods, passing his poker chip across his fingers. “As Browning, I’ll plant the seed in Fischer’s conscious mind, and then on each successive level, Fischer’s subconscious should feed the idea right back to him.”

“Should?” Arthur raises his eyebrows. “For all we know his projections are armed with fucking tanks. We need to do a little better than _should_.”

Eames swivels to face him, plainly irritated. “This isn’t an exact science. We have no way of knowing how Fischer will absorb the information we give him, and the deeper we go, the greater the uncertainty. I know you’re fond of specificity, darling, but it’s the best I’ve got.”

And because Arthur still thinks Eames is a fool for walking into this mess, because Arthur hears the caustic irony in that word, _darling_ , whether Eames meant it or not – because he still wants Eames despite everything, he says, heartlessly, “I’m not asking you to draw me fucking flowcharts, I just don’t want any of us ending up like Mal.”

He regrets it as soon as her name leaves his mouth, but what’s done is done. He hears Ariadne say, “Jesus, Arthur,” sees Yusuf in his periphery, swinging his legs over the edge of his chair, in case things get ugly, uglier. And Eames – Eames looks pale and pained, sickened, like Arthur’s just plunged two hands into his chest and dug into all his insecurities, ripped them from their roots and painted the walls with them.

“I’m aware the risks outweigh the rewards,” Eames finally says, voice silky, perfectly composed, and it’s the incongruity that cracks Arthur open. “If any of you want out, I’d appreciate it if you let me know sooner rather than later. Discuss it amongst yourselves if you’d like, I’ll be outside having a smoke.”

Then he stands, pocketing his poker chip with one hand and pulling out his cigarettes with the other, and walks out.

Twelve hours later, a sleek, satiny S-class takes Eames to Fischer-Morrow while the rest of them spread themselves out in the warehouse, working steadily through a gallon of cold brew as they start cobbling the pieces together.

It takes Ariadne another four hours to sidle her way over to Arthur’s desk and lean against it casually. Arthur’s frankly shocked she’s kept quiet for this long.

“It’s a hell of a job,” she says lightly, and Arthur hums in vague agreement, clicking through his new emails, weeding out the sources that come up empty. “Not that I’m complaining about the work. The work is fantastic, exciting, _innovative_ for a change. I mean, easy money is easy money, but, I swear to God, if I have to build one more penthouse suite with shag carpeting – ”

“Ariadne,” Arthur finally interrupts, because he’s never been a fan of slowly peeling away a Band-Aid; he’d much rather just rip the fucking thing off, “I’m pretty sure we’ve both lost count of how many times you’ve had to shoot me or stab me or push me off a building, so let’s just be frank with each other.”

She stares at him, giving him a small smile, and then looks down, scuffing a foot against the floor.

“He isn’t better, I can tell,” she says, eyes hurting for the both of them when she looks up. “If anything, he’s worse and she’s just buried deeper. She could be the thing that makes or breaks us. She probably will be.”

“You think I don’t know that?” Arthur says, rubbing at his forehead, body shooting from pleasantly wired straight to tense as fuck.

Ariadne pauses, gnawing at her lip. “We’ve all dealt with loss. We grieve and then we slowly remember to live our lives. Eames, though – what happened down there, Arthur? Why can’t he let her go?”

Arthur breathes, and then slumps back in his chair in defeat. “I don’t know. I don’t _know_.”

“What do you mean?” she says, frowning. “How can you not – ”

“He never told me,” he says shortly, and the truth of it still hurts like hell, like a cauterized wound when you’re stone-cold sober.

Ariadne looks stunned. “Shit. I just assumed – the three of you were inseparable.”

“You think I would’ve let you sign onto the Tangier job if I knew? Jesus, Ariadne. I might be an asshole, but I’m not a fucking sadist.”

The look she gives him then is more pitying than anything else, and he presses his tongue against the bitter taste in his mouth, the acidic reflux of an old terror working its way up his throat.

“You need to help him work this out, Arthur. You, not anyone else. Or, and this is me being frank with you, we won’t have a chance in hell of pulling this off.”

This time Arthur just stays quiet, thinking that with him and Eames, nothing’s ever been easily said or easily done.

*

_Arthur leans against the doorway to the kitchen and watches Mal unlatch little James from her hip, passing him to Dom so she can check on the stew – because Dom can fix a dripping faucet, build a swing set, separate whites and colors, but he can’t cook worth shit._

_Arthur watches Dom curl a finger under Mal’s chin to give her a kiss, soft and sure, the fit of their mouths having long since become second nature._

_“A heartwarming tableau,” Eames murmurs from behind. “Very nearly makes me yearn for a life of financial responsibility and domestic bliss.”_

_“You’re so full of shit,” Arthur says without turning around, even though he might’ve said the same thing to Mal four years ago._

_He sees it now, why she gave it all up and Dom had only needed to ask. She wanted to be adored, to adore someone in return, and Dom gave her that chance. He’d built for her, brick upon solid brick, the grand romance she’d been dreaming of._

*

Eames is officially on Fischer-Morrow’s payroll for 24 hours, and only slightly put out about not seeing a penny of it; he’s never quite understood the lure of a legitimate paycheck.

Unofficially, he observes, doodles on his legal pad, and concludes that Maurice Fischer must’ve been a real bastard in his prime, having lost his touch only by virtue of being stuck on life support. Eames keeps one eye on Browning and the other on Fischer, pegging him from day one as the sort to seek approval, and crave it more the harder it is to come by. He sees the hurt in Fischer’s grief plain as day, the self-recrimination, and thinks this job might be easier than any of them could’ve hoped for.

His first morning back at the warehouse, Yusuf triumphantly brandishes his tailor-made compound.

“As long as it keeps the dream stable enough so the third level doesn’t bury – collapse on our heads the second there’s a disturbance,” Arthur says, his tipped-back chair slipping half an inch.

Yusuf starts pontificating about the science but Eames isn’t listening. Eames is pulling Arthur from a shallow grave, head empty save for one thought: that this – Arthur gasping and whimpering, eyes half-mad with terror, wrists scraped raw under all the blood, curled in on himself – this is Arthur broken, in enough places that there’s no going back from it.

“Eames.” Arthur’s staring at him, a little crease between his eyebrows, the shape of him sharp and unyielding and still, after all these years, unlike anything Eames has ever seen, and he’s never thought Arthur stupid but he thinks it now. Stupid for handing Eames what he’s done nothing to deserve, stupid for being conned into this life by the best conmen in the business, stupid for being so competent and still so trusting.

“Apologies,” Eames blinks at Yusuf, “Where were we?”

“Yusuf was getting misty-eyed over spending ten years in his favorite dream,” Ariadne says. “I assume you’re planning on us getting out quicker than that.”

“With sub-security, we can’t afford more than a few hours on each level,” Arthur says.

“Thank you, Arthur, for that contribution,” Eames smiles thinly. “If Fischer’s subconscious cooperates, we won’t need more than a few hours.”

Arthur’s jaw tightens right before he drops his chair, making it bang against the floor.

“There’s something else I’ve been trying to figure out,” he says slowly, turning to Yusuf. “If we’re so heavily sedated, do we still wake up if we die in the dream?”

For a moment there’s complete silence. Ariadne blinks, a little startled, Yusuf looks uneasy, and Arthur’s staring at Eames again, like he already knows and he has plans to murder Eames six ways to Sunday, neatly and without a fuss.

“No,” Eames says at last, because there’s no gentler way to put it. “You fall into Limbo.”

“You must be fucking kidding me,” Ariadne proclaims, to no one in particular, eyes unfocused as she considers the implications.

Arthur says wryly, “And here I was, thinking we’d just shoot each other in the head after it’s all said and done.”

He doesn’t walk out after that, and neither does Ariadne. She just stares down at her impossible mazes and Arthur at his computer, at everything but Eames until they’re prepping for their dry run of a two-level kick.

Then Arthur asks as he’s unspooling the IV lines, “When were you planning on telling us?”, the threat in his voice so thinly veiled he might as well have backed Eames into a corner with a knife against his throat.

“I’ve diluted the compound to approximately a quarter of its intended potency,” Yusuf informs them as he drops the vial into its cradle. “You’ll be administered a dose that’ll wear off in five minutes, which means you’ve got 25 minutes on the first level and two hours on the second, so if the kicks fail to work – sit tight, have a drink on me.”

“I hadn’t worked that part out yet,” Eames admits to Arthur quietly, figures he’s had nothing to lose for quite some time. “But I would’ve told you. I was going to tell you.”

Arthur’s eyes slide to him then, searching him, edge to edge, for a lie.

“Yea, well, when it comes to being straight with me, you have a pretty shitty track record,” Arthur tells him, then jams the needle into his arm.

The sky looks foreboding over the streets of New York, clouds rumbling, gathering conspiratorially, wind whipping through Eames’s jacket and tangling in Ariadne’s hair.  
With their projections suppressed the place feels like a ghost town, a graveyard with towering tombstones all in a row.

“The van’s over here.” Ariadne nods at the far right street corner and leads the way. “Who’s gonna be the dreamer?”

Arthur pulls open the back doors, then unbuttons his jacket as he turns to Ariadne.

“I’ll do it,” Eames cuts in.

Ariadne crosses her arms over her chest, eyebrows twitching, but says nothing. Arthur deals Eames his poker face before climbing into the van and popping open the PASIV.

“You’re running this show,” he says evenly, the shrug of his shoulders lazy without seeming contrived.

Contrary to his reputation, Arthur is, in fact, a fantastic actor, as naturally adept as he is meticulously learned. He just has an idiosyncratic preference for the all-or-nothing approach to social interaction: being painfully candid – mostly painful for all the other parties involved – or exasperatingly tight-lipped. This kind of casual subterfuge he generally avoids, doesn’t have the stomach for unless he thinks there’s no other way to navigate the minefield he’s been dropped in so unceremoniously. It would flood Eames with guilt if he weren’t already drowning in it.

They arrange themselves on opposite sides of the van with the PASIV dead center, and beside it, an iPod and headphones colored a matching sapphire blue.

Right before Ariadne depresses the trigger, she tells him, words low and fierce, “I’m sticking this one out to the end because I want you to get your life back, I really do. But these secrets you’re keeping – whatever they are – they’ll leave you with nothing if you’re not careful. And then they’ll eat you alive.”

The lobby of the Four Seasons gleams from top to bottom, soaked in ambiance that costs upwards of 600 a night, and in the cloying fragrance of gardenias – a prodigious center bouquet that takes up an impressive amount of square footage.

“Is this – ” Arthur looks and sounds out of sorts, out of breath, like he’s just washed up to shore after being lost at sea, except he’s not at all sure if he’d take traversing this unforgiving terrain over sinking into a watery grave.

Eames takes a step to go to him before stopping himself, from touching Arthur uninvited, from presuming he could offer assurance and Arthur would take him at his word.

“Belated and clumsy,” he says, duly repentant, “but they say better late than never.”

He takes the lead as they wend through the halls and floors, stopping finally in front of room 1030 as he pulls out the keycard from his breast pocket.

The suite is pristine, untouched, until they get to the bedroom.

“Jesus Christ.” Tempered glass from the shattered coffee table crunches under Arthur’s foot.

The lamps belonging to either side of the bed have been thrown with force against the wall, the armchair overturned, and potpourri strewn across the carpet, marking a tortuous procession from the middle of the room to the French doors, flung open to the night air.

“I found the room like this,” Eames says, looking everywhere and nowhere, digging for his poker chip. “Mal had put on her black evening gown. It looked just like the one she’d worn in our last moments in Limbo, when we told each other we’d go out in style.”

He takes the last few steps onto the balcony, presses his palms against the railing and breathes through his nose, in and out, until his head is spinning from it. Beyond his fingertips there’s no glittering cityscape where there should be, only blackness.

“I stepped my way around the glass, already fucking terrified of what she might’ve done to herself, she always had a talent for drama, and there she was, balanced on the edge of the balcony, in bloody heels no less.”

He hears Arthur’s laugh behind him, cut abruptly, hideously short, mangled in the confluence of life and death.

“I tried to coax her down, but she said she’d jump – jump for sure if I got any closer. I _tried_ , goddamn it,” he says, voice rising, “but she was so bloody convinced. She said – ”

“I have to go, Eames, back to my children.”

They both spin around, and Mal – Mal’s standing ten meters away, cutting an arresting figure in her Givenchy Haute Couture, a look of stern censure marring her beautiful face.

“My husband. They must be missing me terribly.” She steps closer and Arthur inhales sharply, digging hard fingers into Eames’s shoulder. “They must be because I can feel the ache, crowding my heart against my chest, stealing my breath. You’re selfish for keeping me here, Eames, lying to me, cruel for making me believe this is real, that the projections of James and Philippa and Dom are real.” Then she smiles all of a sudden, eyes glinting, flat and cold. “It went something like that, didn’t it? Eames behaved appallingly, Arthur, you would’ve been shocked. Although – maybe not. You always did expect the worst from him.”

Her smile widens, in a gross pantomime of what was only ever lovely. Then the music starts to play.

Mal frowns slowly. “You’re not leaving now, are you? I’m just getting to the thrilling part of the story. Don’t you want me to show you how it ends?”

She tilts her head, looking distinctly pernicious now, homicidal, which is when Eames says, “ _Run_.”

And then they’re bolting for the door, shoving past Mal before she can arm herself, and bursting out into the corridor.

“The pool,” Arthur gasps, punching the button for the lift, and when the doors don’t open, heading for the stairs.

The music starts crescendoing when they reach the third floor. Eames runs through his mental floor plan and then kicks down the fourth door to the right. They race to the balcony, heaving themselves up on the edge, and stare at the crystalline water below.

At the climax, they jump.

They wake up together with Ariadne and, for once, Eames doesn’t deflect, doesn’t cover his tracks. He just turns to Arthur, heart exposed by the dream like a broken bone, and says, “I’m sorry, I didn’t think – shit,” before heading to the loo at the opposite end of the warehouse.

He flings the door open and presses his palms against the nearest sink, squeezing his eyes shut until the seams of them flare white, and still he can see Mal – the familiar heavy-handed forgery of her, all flourish and no depth, none of the brightness Mal had and trailed behind her like the pale petals of the tea roses she kept alive out of sheer bloody-mindedness. It should put some distance between him and grief, enough to let him breathe. Instead she’s impossibly near, a phantom limb that won’t let him move onto a center of gravity where she’s unaccounted for.

The door bangs open, the sound ricocheting like a gunshot.

“Eight and a half months, eight and a half – _goddamn_ it, Eames, she’s – get it the fuck under control. You think you haven’t given us enough reason to hang you out to dry? You’re making it too goddamn easy,” Arthur says harshly, face pinched when Eames looks into the mirror, mouth tight with residual terror, and all Eames can think is that easy was how it used to be between them, with Mal coaxing Arthur out of his shell while she whispers to Eames, _look, you idiot, isn’t he beautiful_.

So he says, eyes bone-dry, “Mal would never hurt you.”

Arthur moves, lightning quick, already taking a swing at him as he turns around, momentum wild and mean, rage luminous in a way Eames has only ever witnessed once, the day before Mal’s wake when Dom had lost it and screamed abuse at him until Arthur gave Dom a black eye, which had stood out unbearably ugly against the newly-bloomed carnations surrounding Mal’s casket.

Arthur’s fist connects with the side of his mouth, making him stumble back a step, teeth cutting into the inside of his cheek. The next swing he manages to duck and then Arthur’s just shoving at him with half-curled fists, bearing down on him, bright and menacing, like Eames doesn’t have a solid 20-pound advantage.

“She buried me in Tangier, she buried me alive in that dream,” Arthur says, voice low and shredded and thick, swollen with the memory of it. Eames’s shoulder blades hit the back wall. “She made sure I had no way of ending it. I thought I’d go crazy before you ever found me – because you know what’s worse than falling into Limbo and forgetting you’re asleep? It’s wanting to wake up, thinking that if you just wake up, it’ll be all right, but knowing you can’t. And Mal never – she never would’ve – ”

This time when Arthur lifts a hand to strike Eames, Eames catches it, fingers wrapping around Arthur’s wrist. Arthur’s other hand retaliates, quicker than a heartbeat, and he catches that one, too, squeezing hard, knowing Arthur bruises easily, beautifully.

“I don’t know how many times I’ve pulled you out of that grave. Every time feeling just as real as the last.” He pauses, swallowing the blood pooling in his mouth. “Whatever I can give as reparation, whatever you want – it’s yours.”

Arthur’s breathing slowly now, muscles easing into Eames’s grip, rage suddenly spent, looking at Eames like he doesn’t know how they got here, how they could’ve built such an extraordinary life and then broken it in so many places.

“Stop punishing yourself. Stop thinking you could’ve done something to save her. Stop pretending you can do this on your own. Pretending you can carry all this grief and you’re not crushed under the weight of it. Just _stop_.”

Then Arthur presses in, wrists still caught in Eames’s hands but making Eames feel caged in anyway, with those eyes that tell him he’s the stupid one, for not trusting enough, for thinking himself an island and leaving his ships to rust.

It’s only one of a hundred ways he reminds Eames of how dangerous he is – the other 99 Eames would enumerate fondly, starting with the seductive accuracy of his double-tap and blood splattering his French cuffs like a grisly Jackson Pollock – but it’s the most terrifying one, how persuasive he can be with one damning look. It’s how Eames knew never to put himself in a position to be persuaded.

“You don’t know what you’re asking.” It makes him a liar, but he knows it’s by far the smallest degree of separation between monsters and men. “Beat me bloody, alert the Feds, make me grovel for your forgiveness and then leave me empty-handed. But this – just let me handle this. Maybe it’s lunacy, but it’s still far better than the alternative I’m afraid.”

Arthur frowns, more exasperated than truly angry, thighs still warm against him. “You’re stubborn as fuck, you know that? Worse than me. You just make it sound prettier.”

Eames has to laugh, and it comes out all wrong, pitifully bent out of shape.

“That’s a compliment if I ever heard one.”

Then Arthur just looks solemn, quieted by some realization as he tugs one wrist free from Eames’s loosening fingers and wipes at the blood at the corner of Eames’s mouth with his thumb, like he’s trying to uncover something from another time he knew well.

“It would fucking break Mal’s heart if she saw you like this. She’d manhandle you to the kitchen and then she’d pour you wine, glass after glass, until you both end up drinking straight from the bottle, etiquette be damned. She’d lay your head in her lap and lean over you, smiling and still completely lucid because she could always hold her liquor better than the rest of us put together.”

Eames tips his head back against the wall as Arthur curls in, presses his forehead to Eames’s chin, breath hot against his throat. He fits a hand around Arthur’s hip, mooring Arthur to his shores before saying, “Then she’d just look at you, demanding but still perfectly patient, perfectly willing to wait until you gave up all your secrets. I learned most of her tricks, but I could never learn that one. Which is just as well. I’d use it for all sorts of nefarious purposes. She only used it for good. And that was the thing about her, wasn’t it? She swindled and conned like she invented the trade, but you never forgot who she was. She never let you forget.”

*

_In Tangier, on their climb to the Kasbah, scarf veiling her turned cheek, Mal tells him she had a dream._

_“I had a family and they were beautiful, Eames.” Her eyes are fevered, in that way when something desirable is out of her reach but possible nevertheless. “Two children, a boy and a girl. Small and precious, and so fragile, even though they gripped my hand so hard, like I might slip away if they turned their heads. And their father – oh, he was lovely. Charming but not even a little bit flighty. Not like you, Eames. When he looked at me, I saw the best parts of myself.”_

_And there, against the backdrop of a sun-bleached fortress, trampling ancient history underfoot, Eames learns something about Limbo. That it’s not just boundless, it’s bottomless if you let it, and the descent is so quick, so soundless, there’s no arresting it._

_That Limbo promises you everything you want, and all it asks for in return is a willingness to forget._

*

Maurice Fischer dies three days later. Saito shows up at the warehouse unannounced to personally hand them their travel documents, lines like razor blades, smiling like a shark, and not for the first time Arthur thinks Saito could’ve gone through life just as well on the other side of the tracks, better even.

“You don’t need to worry about logistics. I bought the airline,” he tells them, in the same tidy way he shakes your hand.

Arthur, for better or worse, has slowly become a man who isn’t easily impressed, but he would be now if he weren’t so aggressively keeping Eames in his periphery, wanting to put a hand on him the minute he steps into Arthur’s space, somewhere discreet but significant. It’s a visceral need that’s left him off-kilter the last few days, made his joints ache, like he’s walking on a perpetually tilted plane. He could check his die but that’s breaking the first rule in his book, which is to never look like an amateur because he isn’t fucking one. What no one figures starting out is that the more you dream, the more you learn about how it fundamentally differs from reality. He could check his die, but, really, he already knows what it’ll tell him. So he just watches Eames run through the topside plan for the nth time for Saito’s benefit, and remembers the time Mal took his arm and pulled it over her shoulders, turning as she laid her head back against the crook of his neck, saying into his ear, you should never be ashamed of needing to touch or be touched, not when you mean it.

Saito picks them up for their flight the next day, in that hazy hour when vibrant nightlife bleeds into bleak early morning regrets over those last few tequila shots.

“Make me beat off rabid projections with a stick, or build Versailles on the moon, but this – this is asking too much,” Ariadne says to the room at large, bleary-eyed, shuffling out to the car with her bags and looking uncannily zombie-like. By Arthur’s estimation, which is rarely off by a margin wider than a thumbnail, she’s the only one in the business who still consistently runs on the 7 to 8 hours of sleep recommended by the NIH.

Yusuf, who by all accounts runs entirely on pharmaceuticals, trails after her, grinning.

“Aw, is the interrupted sleepy time making wittle Ariadne cranky?”

“You really want to do this right now? Because I can make it extremely embarrassing for you.”

Then the warehouse goes silent. Eames is double-checking the presets on his PASIV, dressed in swaths of black, no color in sight, forehead creased in concentration, mouth humorless. And Arthur, while he always makes a point of liking their chances, thinks, just in case.

“Eames,” he says, as a courtesy more than anything, before walking over and clamping a hand around the back of Eames’s neck, yanking him in and kissing him thoroughly.

Eames grunts in surprise, and then he’s palming Arthur’s cheek, shuddering, letting himself drink from Arthur’s mouth like he’s sucking the marrow out of Arthur’s bones, his long since hollowed out. And Arthur – Arthur feels just as greedy, just as starved out by these black bitter months that stretched on like an Arctic winter.

He claws at Eames’s shirt, bites at Eames’s mouth, taking perverse pleasure in the way his lungs combust, wanting to make up for all the lost time, make Eames moan and shake, gasp then laugh – to fuck him until he’s boneless and strung out, and then do it again. He _wants_ , and then he pulls back, just enough to let them breathe.

He studies Eames for a second, mouth spit-slicked, bitten red, eyes a smoking wreck, before he says, “for luck.”

When they’re on the tarmac, watching Robert Fischer board the first flight of the rest of his life, Yusuf turns to Arthur and says, “someone checked his blood work, right?”

Arthur stares at him for a long, purposeful moment before saying, “Who the fuck do you think I am?”, and they leave it at that.

They reach cruising altitude a half hour later. Eames graciously returns the passport he lifted from Fischer when they boarded, makes small talk, and drugs Fischer’s water. Arthur ticks off the boxes in his head, one by one. And then they sleep.

Fischer’s security wastes no time storming the first level, organized and armed to the teeth, but the thing about Ariadne’s Manhattan is: it’s not a grid, it’s a labyrinth that’ll swallow you whole if you’re not careful, tailor-made to chew you up and never spit you back out.

They get Fischer to the warehouse with minimal trouble and rough him up before Eames puts on his one-man show. By then, Fischer’s projections have them surrounded. Arthur finds Ariadne camped out by the east entrance, deftly handling a rifle built for a man twice her size, taking heat from the snipers stationed on the rooftop one warehouse over.

“There was this one thing Eames always said to me that sounded so fucking smooth, back when I didn’t know any better,” Arthur says, coming up behind her, then affects a British accent that, once, made Mal snort milk out of her nose, laughing at him or with him, he never knew. “You mustn’t be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling.”

Then he hoists the grenade launcher up and against his shoulder, and fires. The explosion is magnificent, shockingly bright against the leaden sky.

Ariadne’s blinking at him when he turns. “I don’t know if I’m disturbed or turned on. Disturbed because that British accent reminded me of my grandmother trying to emulate Maggie Smith. Turned on because, well, who doesn’t have a weakness for big, thick guns?”

Arthur thinks he needs to bleach his brain after that. “Please don’t ever – ” And then they’re ducking behind the doors as a resurgence of gunfire ricochets off the steel.

“Motherfuckers,” he spits out as a bullet grazes his cheek, leaving a line of heat. He hasn’t come up against projections this mean – probably since Kiev, hijacking intelligence from a mark with Genghis fucking Khan as his namesake. “We’re gonna have to cut this short.”

They yank another bag over Fischer’s head and pull Eames out. Eames isn’t happy about it.

“I needed more time. I was supposed to have more time,” he says, edgy, as they barrel through midtown with Yusuf at the helm, bullets pinging off the van like the first signs of an apocalyptic hailstorm. “This isn’t going to work.”

“Well, make it work,” Arthur snaps, unspooling the IV lines. “This isn’t the time to be fresh out of bright ideas.”

Eames presses his lips together. “Mr. Charles.”

Ariadne raises her eyebrows and says, “Did Taipei teach you nothing?”

“We need his projections to back off. It’s the only way.” Eames stares at the carpeting. “And it no longer makes sense to use Browning as an ally, he’s too much of a father figure. We’ll have to turn Fischer against him to get the reconciliation we want. Won’t hurt to knock him down a peg or two, besides. He’s gotten rather intimate with the company accounts.”

It’s one of those principles Eames is careful not to label as one, tucked in between his unregistered firearms and his vices. He explained it to Arthur once, not long after they met, as if he’d been testing to see if Arthur would pass muster. The way Eames sees it, dishonesty comes in two kinds: the kind you cultivate the way you would a rose garden – keeping it in direct sunlight, competing with the neighbors while you tell them that theirs is just splendid – and the kind you shove like a dead body under the stairs before having your boss and his wife over for dinner. Over the years, Arthur’s known Eames to be many things, but never deluded, never coy about the kind of man he chose to be.

“Pretty easy to pick an option when there’s only one,” Arthur reasons. In truth, there wasn’t much to glean from Taipei beyond what they should’ve already known, which was exercising extreme caution in emerging markets where the kind of profit margins dreamshare generates makes all kinds come out of the woodwork.

“Yusuf, if you need to buy us more time, remember I put the – ” Ariadne starts before Yusuf cuts her off.

“You know I have an eidetic memory, right? Hurry up and go save the planet from overzealous capitalists – or whatever the hell we’re doing,” Yusuf says calmly as he commits about a dozen traffic violations, hands smooth against the wheel. It only takes a few taps of the keyboard to learn that Yusuf gets by on the kind of mind that’ll be donated to science when he’s done with it. What you only learn first-hand is that he also gets by on being underestimated, which, Arthur figures, is why he and Eames get along so well. Why theirs is a rapport that goes beyond the familiarity you ease into when you’ve worked with someone long enough to be pretty sure he won’t do something so stupid as to get you killed.

“Christ, Yusuf, don’t make it sound so bloody noble, it’s giving me hives,” Eames says before they slide their needles in and sleep again.

Ariadne’s dressed herself in a sharp, tasteful dove-gray suit with a skirt that hits just above the knee and makes her legs look a mile long, paired with incredibly impractical Manolo Blahniks that strike the marble flooring like ice picks and look about as dangerous. It’s not the person she is topside or, for that matter, a person she’d ever want to be topside. It’s the kind of the person she tries on for size, because dreams are convenient that way, thinking if there’s any place where she can get away with it, it’s here – and doesn’t everybody. Every dream can be your own private playground if you let it, Arthur thinks as he tracks Eames’s progress towards Fischer, who’s nursing a drink at the hotel bar like he wouldn’t mind drowning in it.

“Anyone else and I’d say we’re goners, but Eames – Eames might just pull it off,” Ariadne murmurs, eyes slanted in his direction.

“He’ll pull it off,” Arthur says, and it’s the kind of certainty he’d bring with him to a knife fight, or a card table in the backroom of a noodle shop in Hanoi where they throw out the dead bodies with the trash every Tuesday and Thursday. Because it’s never a matter of _if_ with Eames, just a matter of how fast, how easy.

He watches Eames slip into character, smooth as silk, and waits for Robert Fischer to fall for it, hook, line, and sinker. Eames is still visibly Eames, and at the same time inarguably not. He moves and smiles and reels Fischer in, and Arthur watches it all with an old fascination. The thing about Eames’s cons is he doesn’t care so much about their reach as he does about their depth. It’s not just the skin he wears, it’s the heart and all the substance in between, shaping and shifting like plate tectonics. And Arthur starts to think it might not be so hard to wipe away the last eight months, go back to when he knew Eames, knew the geology of him and saw in it, unobscured, the accumulation of their years.

“Dom pulled it off, once,” he tells Ariadne absently, then jerks his head towards the elevators, mindful that the clock is still ticking too fast for his liking.

“Ah, Dom Cobb. Overbearing criminal mastermind with a God complex turned strait-laced family man. Or, so the tales go.”

“There’s always two sides to every coin,” Arthur shrugs. It’s something people have a hard time learning in this business. Everyone wears at least two faces, even Dom Cobb who’s about as obvious as they come. It was the first Dom who had hooked Mal in, and the second who kept her, who still mourns her like he could let his grief wash him away if he didn’t have his children clutching him tight.

“Security,” Ariadne says under her breath as they step out onto the fourth floor and spot the two suits at the end of the hallway. “Guess Eames isn’t as charming as he thinks he is.”

“I’ll head them off, you go prep the charges. I’ll meet you upstairs.” When Ariadne stops at the door to 491, he keeps walking, staring down the guards coming his way, hands going to their waistbands. Then he turns with a knee-jerk motion, ducking into the stairwell as bullets fly past his ear.

He’s halfway to the fifth floor, taking two steps at a time as he unbuttons his jacket, when a third projection intercepts him on the landing.

“Don’t tell me he’s fooled you, too.”

He stares at himself, dressed neatly in the pinstripes he wears only when he’s sure there won’t be blood involved, stance wide, hands in his pockets, smiling like he saw this coming.

The resemblance is cosmetic at best. If Eames were here, he’d hum and judge. He’d say it passes for Arthur insofar as the print of a Degas can be called a true Degas – the same dimensions, the same palette, the same arc of a tilted jaw, but no texture, no history, no _life_. It’s too perfect even for a projection, and it makes Arthur’s stomach turn a little, to see his face absent of worry lines and laugh lines and the residue from sleepless nights that’ll take him some time to rub off.

“He won’t just get you killed, he’ll do a lot worse,” dream Arthur continues, which is when the malice starts to show, the perverseness that recalls Tangier – and Mal’s shade, a looming specter in broad daylight. “So what I’m about to do, it’s for the best.”

When he takes the first swing, Arthur’s too busy finding his breath to duck. The punch clips him under his left eye, jarring bone and making him stagger back against the wall.

Then it’s an all-out brawl, no holds barred. A dirty schoolyard fight with no calculation or finesse, just fists and knees anywhere there’s an opening.

It turns out dream Arthur is still Arthur enough to put them on an even keel, matching him blow for blow until he feels his heels against the edge of a stair. And then he’s struck by his own stupidity. He tastes the bloodlust at the back of his throat, the snarling need to sink his teeth into his imposter and tear him open, then watch the poison bleed out.

He thinks about the measures he’s taken over the years, small but scrupulous, to make sure he can live with himself from one day to the next, through to the next life if he makes it that far. And then he jerks his weight to the left, tipping the scales just enough to wrench them both to the edge. The stairs split and rise, architecture reshuffling like a Rubik’s cube.

“Paradox,” he smiles at his double, face twisted in surprise, before sending him to his long descent.

When he gets to the fifth floor, he meets the barrel of Ariadne’s SIG P220.

“Hey, hey, hey, it’s me,” he says, hands up, heart trying to hammer through his chest, as she lowers the gun.

“Taking extra precautions. It’s eerily quiet right now. Normally I’d never look a gift horse in the mouth, but –,” she says, then stops short and grins, nodding at his raging shiner that no doubt looks three times worse than it feels because he bruises like a delicate flower; it’s a fucking painful cross to bear. “Do I want to know what you did to the guy who gave you that?”

“Nothing he didn’t deserve,” he says succinctly.

Which is when the elevator dings and Fischer steps out, Eames on his heels.

“It’s all right, they work for me,” Eames says when Fischer pauses, laying a hand on his shoulder. As soon as Arthur sees Fischer easing into the touch instead of flinching away, he thinks, _bingo_. “Now try to see if any of these room numbers rings a bell. Just breathe and think.”

Arthur’s heart skips a beat when Fischer passes 528. Then he doubles back.

When they knock down the door, there’s nothing there where it shouldn’t be, save for a PASIV that’s been set on the bed, gleaming like a post-modern Pandora’s box.

“We’re not dealing with amateurs,” Eames frowns. “Looks to me like they planned to put you under again. They’re sparing no expense in getting their hands on that alternate will.”

“I’m sorry, I – you mean a dream within a dream? Is that possible?” Fischer says, face pinched, distressed, bewildered, but not terrified. The kind of confidence born from privilege, Arthur thinks. From always having the means to buy your way out of trouble, and never having encountered anyone who couldn’t be bought.

Before Eames can answer, they hear a key card sliding into the door, the click of the locking mechanism.

Arthur moves quickly and knocks the projection onto his knees before he can cry out. It’s Browning, which means all their pieces are in play now. And in the time it takes most people to pick a radio station, Eames pulls off a coup.

“He’s helping us break into his own subconscious,” Ariadne says, helplessly impressed, after they put Fischer under. “I hate to say it, Eames, because you’re already a smug pain in the ass, but – you’re a genius.”

“I’m very discriminating when it comes to arses. You should feel special,” Eames tells her, settling down at the foot of the bed.

“I take it back,” Ariadne says immediately. “I take it all back.”

Arthur bites back a smile as he kneels down next to Eames and takes their lines from Ariadne.

“Hey, let me see that,” Eames says suddenly, voice going soft and quiet as he reaches up to take Arthur’s face in one hand, thumb hovering over the bruising, but not touching. He hums low in his throat, a rumble of discontent. “Security ran you down pretty hard.”

It’s a dangerous thing, this pause, this easing of the breakneck pace that’s been propelling Arthur forward and blurring the landscape until there’s no distinguishing solid ground from wide open space. Past a point it’s stunningly simple, framing it all in terms of do-or-die, sink-or-swim, leaving everything to instinct. But now, with time grinding to a halt and Eames so present, showing his years and still as fucking beautiful as he was the day they met, Arthur sees the thin snaking precipice. He sees that only Eames could’ve brought in the rogue projection. That he’s never gotten anything more wrong in his life, being so close-fisted with his forgiveness when Eames was so generous with his grief. That Mal was right, they could have something – not the myth she made it out to be, but something _good_.

Arthur wants to say, I need us to survive this.

Instead he says, “Go to sleep, Mr. Eames.”

*

_Arthur’s not there when they wake up, but he’s there in the weeks after, when Dom and Mal fight so much she checks into the Four Seasons for three nights to find some space. When the kids ask Dom where their mother went and he looks so fucking crippled, by sadness, by a loss he can’t even name, that Arthur can’t stand to look at him._

_While Mal is volatile, increasingly nonsensical, Eames is sullen and tight-lipped. And, Arthur knows, Eames may keep a tight lid on his name, his past, the whereabouts of his collection of forged and pilfered art, but he’s never quiet on the subject of dreams, always talks about them in low, lilting tones until Arthur’s dizzy and aching with something that feels like lust._

_No matter who asks him about Limbo, Arthur or Dom, he responds with the same opacity, the same smile that makes Arthur think that even this inch is costing him._

_We got a bit lost, he tells them, but we found our way, in the end._

*

Eames’s first thought when he emerges on the bottom level is, this is a lot of fucking snow.

His second thought is that it makes perfect sense. While he cuts across entire continents to avoid the stuff like the Bubonic plague, Arthur loves it, and Arthur’s the dreamer. Arthur looks beautifully at home, and beautiful, in his snowsuit, cheeks stung pink from the wind, eyes glittering, longing, as they travel down the clean white slopes to the medical complex below. He must’ve figured familiarity would breed stability, not that he’s ever needed a leg up in that department. It’s something else that makes people assume the military had their way with him, broke him then stitched him back up, so tight he lets nothing in or out. In truth, it’s entirely self-made, guided only by a single principle that Mal once offered up like the keys to the kingdom: _Down in the dream and up here, there’s not so much difference. You make them see what you want them to see, and you don’t half-ass it, you do it with utter conviction_. Needless, really, given Arthur’s the sort of man to never do anything by halves.

“What’s down there?” Fischer asks, lips trembling a little, from the cold and maybe from something else entirely.

“The truth,” Eames replies, then slides on his goggles, knowing, despite not having skied once in his life, he could be a bloody Olympian down here if that’s what he wanted. “You should prepare yourself, Mr. Fischer. In my experience, it’s rarely what anyone expects.”

They let Fischer take the lead, staying close on his heels. There are no trees, no higher ground from which snipers might pick them off, the mountain dropping precipitously on either side, but Eames dreams up a rifle and a few hand grenades, just in case. Better armed than sorry. It’s one of his tried and true mottos along with only show your back to a dead man.

Once the complex is in plain sight, they take out the guards patrolling the east perimeter before discarding their skis and climbing into the air duct system.

They’ve barely gone a meter before he hears it. The booming brass of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, the flurry of strings, sinking down through the dream, dampened and drawn out but unmistakable. Yusuf, he thinks. Fischer’s hounds must be snapping a bit too hard at his heels for comfort.

Fischer halts. “Do you hear that? What is that?”

“Noise from a level up probably. Nothing to worry about,” Eames says soothingly before he feels Arthur’s hand clamp down on his calf.

“Yusuf must’ve run out of options,” Arthur murmurs as they fall back and Fischer continues on. “I’ll go set the charges, you watch Fischer.”

The cymbals clash, resonance dragging like the continuous surge of the tide pushing towards shore, and for a second Eames loses his breath to the momentum. He looks at Arthur, all steely determination and tempered hope, and he can almost taste their success, see an empire laid to waste, and, just beyond that, his freedom.

He grins, quick and sharp, and says, “The final act’s promising to bring the house down.”

When he gets Fischer to the antechamber, he drops down first. It had taken two marks with a bullet in their heads and Mal threatening, her French like poisoned darts, that she’d tell his mother everything, no details spared, for him to learn the job is never a sure thing until it is.

“The rest is up to you,” Eames tells Fischer and nods at the interior room, the heart of the fortress.

The music plays on. He watches Fischer push the door open and walk in, pace flagging then renewing as he reaches the bed, bending down over his father’s waning breaths, as if this time he’ll glimpse some warmth in death. His shoulders start to shake.

“Come on, come on,” Eames says under his breath.

Maurice Fischer gestures weakly to the safe beside the bed. His son, who’s always done as he’s told, drops to his knees and, after a pause, punches in the numbers Eames recites by heart. 5-2-8-4-9-1.

The door opens and Fischer pulls something out of it. When he shifts to take a final look at his father, Eames sees what he’s holding, spinning with two fingers. A pinwheel.

“Did we do it?”

When Eames turns around Arthur’s right behind him, looking almost as terrified as he did in the 12th hour after Eames and Mal emerged from Limbo, telling Eames I didn’t know if you’d ever wake up, at once ferocious and choked, like he couldn’t decide whether to kiss or kill him.

Eames smiles, weightless. “We did it.”

Then Mal is there.

The shade of her, masquerading as flesh and blood, stands equidistant from him and from Arthur, their bodies forming a perfect triangle.

“What a grand finale,” she says lightly, training her gun on Arthur as Eames brings his up, thumbing off the safety. “But it’s missing something.”

“Mal, careful.” He aims for a clean kill, the spot in the center of her forehead she used to rub absently as if that would chase away the wrinkles, premature but delicate still at the age of 34.

She laughs, clear and lovely, and then turns solemn, beseeching, eyes mirroring his heart. “Oh, Eames, my dear. We were supposed to take on the world together, you and I.”

“Eames. Eames, look at me, this isn’t – ” Arthur starts. And then a shot rings out.

Mal disappears. Arthur falls to his knees, red blooming on his chest.

“ _Goddamn it_ ,” Eames swears, lunging forward to catch Arthur before he crumples.

“Jesus, what the hell happened?” he hears Fischer say behind him.

For a moment he can’t string two words together, can’t remember the first thing about breathing because Arthur’s dying in front of him. Arthur’s heavy in his arms, eyes shutting by increments, but soft and unafraid, as if he’s already forgiven Eames everything and he understands, you don’t just pause to mourn the ones you’ve loved, you go on aching.

Then laying him down, Eames says, “Mr. Fischer, I need you to do exactly as I say.”

The descent is instantaneous, but it feels fathoms deep.

There’s a staleness to the water that wasn’t there before, a stagnancy the tide couldn’t flush out.

Eames crawls onto shore, fisting the sand, damp, cakey, just the right consistency for world building. Then he looks up.

The city lies straight ahead, emptied and unclaimed but his and Mal’s, once. The carved-out heart of Paris, exact in its dimensions where it mattered to Mal – the slow curve of the Seine, the breathless sprawl of the Louvre, hidden gems tucked into narrow streets. Now he sees the danger of it, the yearning in every stone she laid that burned too hot. But then – then all he saw was Mal shedding the weight of her years until she was no longer Cobb’s, only his. The girl who had a taste for Akoya pearls, satin lapels, and Berlioz, but turned into a shameless slob when she knew no one important was looking. Who navigated adulthood with aplomb but, at the heart of her, rebelled against the finality of growing up.

He climbs to his feet and starts to walk, the city looking more ruinous the closer he gets, a lost metropolis that’s spent most of its lifetime drowned in the sea. And still it doesn’t prepare him for what he sees once he’s inside. Streets cracked and buildings in pieces, wounds gaping to show their insides. Rubble accumulating like dunes, dispersing grit into the air he can taste in his mouth. A casualty of war, he thinks numbly, marked edge to edge as a lost cause and left as a sobering reminder that you reap what you sow.

Then he looks up and sees the tower. Montparnasse. The day Mal first brought him there, they’d stood at the foot of it, craning their necks, and she’d said, with something perverse creeping into her voice, _et voilà, the ugliest building in the world_. Still it had a place in her dreams, and from its roof she watched over Paris at night. She would lean into Eames and link their arms, murmur to the world at large about the shimmering streets below, crisscrossing like veins, feeding life to the city’s heart she could feel as acutely as her own.

The structure still looks good as new, which tells Eames what he already knows. It’s where Mal is. More to the point, it’s where she’s taken Arthur.

Limbo, while he knows better than to call it accommodating, is as responsive as any other level, and it takes him no time at all to reach the tower. The lift, when he presses the button for the terrace, gently closes its doors and then skips all the floors in between that neither of them had bothered to fill in. With the conscience of an artist, he’d argued for a façade that hurt less to look at, something more classical, but Mal, who was, for all her unbridled imagination, a purist in the worst possible way, had had none of it.

When he steps out of the lift, he sees the terrace hasn’t changed one bit. The garden is still lush, the fig tree still bearing fruit, the pond stocked with koi, gold and cream-colored and splattered with red. The roof’s edge free of barriers because what Mal hated most was feeling caged in.

She’s at the northeast corner now and Arthur’s beside her, the pair of them looking like a black-tie affair with his coattails and her Vera Wang, plunging down to the small of her back with space wide enough for a lover’s palm. The wind whips around them, smelling like destruction.

“I’m embarrassingly underdressed.”

When they turn, he sees the gunshot wound staining Arthur’s shirtfront, Arthur’s mouth brittle with pain. He sees Arthur looking at him like the last thing he wanted was for Eames to try to save him but he’d hoped for it anyway.

“If Arthur jumps,” Mal wonders, hand coming up to rest on Arthur’s shoulder, “will he die? Or will he wake up, knowing this was all a dream? Will you jump with him? Or will you be a coward and live a lie until everyone you’ve ever loved has left you?”

This time Eames doesn’t give her an opening. This time he brings up his gun and shoots.

Arthur’s there to catch her when she crumples, cushioning her fall. And then Eames is kneeling beside her without remembering the steps he took to get there, cradling her head in his hand as the blood seeps from her stomach, barely distinguishable from the silk of her gown.

“Eames,” Arthur says haltingly, as if he wants to shelter Eames from this, from seeing Mal leave him a second time, but knows it’s one of those terrible things you bear unconditionally for a moment so it doesn’t hold onto you forever.

“Eames,” Mal echoes, still accusing, but weak, dampened by grief, “take a leap with me. You were supposed to – ”

She trails off and swallows, tears running down her cheeks, into the grooves of her nose and mouth. It’s what she’d said to him the day they met at Waterloo Station, finding each other among the mass of thousands who had fixed destinations when they had none. She’d tilted forward on her toes to bring them closer once the strangeness had worn off, eyes gleaming like he could be her one true ally, and told him that to make something out of nothing, all they needed to do was take a leap of faith.

“I’m sorry. God, Mal, I’m so sorry. If I could – ” And he lets his tears run unimpeded, watches them drip down and mingle with hers. “I did what I had to do to get us out. Dom was waiting for you. James, Philippa, Arthur. I couldn’t forget them. I couldn’t let you forget.”

“So you convinced me that none of it was real. You said if I paid attention I would feel the truth of it threaded through the walls, the ground, my own skin. You said I needed to wake up because the world was moving forward while I was standing still, more dead than alive, and I needed to _live_.” It’s how he’d coaxed her, wore her down until she believed. “But the idea didn’t go away, Eames. It infected me like a sickness nothing could cure.”

Her hair is a wild tangle in the wind and Eames pushes it back from her face, thinking she looks more like herself now, beauty as untouchable as a Raphael until she laughed or wept, and then you saw the life pour out of her, moving and immense.

“I didn’t know,” he says, breathless, and lets the guilt cut into him and clean through him a thousand ways. “If I could go back and find another way, I would. I’d scour the Earth if I knew there was a way to bring you back, you know I would. I never – never meant for it to go like this. You were my heart, Mallorie Miles. You are still. And, so help me, I’ll feel it until the end of my days.”

She’s still crying, growing paler by degrees, but she smiles, like she could live with that.

“Sentimental bastard. You could fool the world, but you could never fool me,” she murmurs, reaching up with visible effort to dip two fingers into his shirt pocket.

What she pulls out of it is a photograph. [Smaller than the original that’s still in its frame, glass still shattered from striking the exposed brick of the one flat he owns on paper.](http://s6.postimg.org/d8sa31t35/642_beili_piece2.jpg) It’s the only shred of physical evidence of their mutual existence, a picture Miles took unknowingly, fiddling with his new camera. In it Eames is painfully young, skin still ill-fitting, wide-eyed in a way that’s always made him want, reflexively, to burn the damn thing for the sake of his dignity. But Mal is radiant. Mal has her arm around him as if they’ve done this their whole lives and there’s no reason to think they wouldn’t do it forever.

“Eames,” Arthur says suddenly.

He glances up and sees a stripe of lightning bisecting the sky, white-hot light furious and far-flung.

“Stay with me, just a little longer. I can’t bear to watch you go.” Mal’s eyelids are heavy, lashes fanning at her cheeks.

“We had a bloody good run, you and I,” he reminds her gently, pressing a kiss to her forehead, catching the scent of lavender in her hair.

When he moves away, her eyes are closed. He lays her down and stands up, feeling stretched and hollowed out but in one miraculous piece. Like the first time he saw the sheer destructive force of his dream caving in around him and Mal was there when he woke up, reassuring him with hands cool against his face that the world hasn’t ended, in fact, it’s still in beautiful perpetual motion.

“Take a leap with me, darling,” he says to Arthur as the sky rips down the middle. And then they jump.

Eames opens his eyes to the sight of the back of Robert Fischer’s head, stirring as the dream wears off. By Yusuf’s calculations, the added sedative in Fischer’s drink will buy them at least another half hour.

He shifts, mouth dry as chalk, wincing at the crick in his neck, and finds Arthur. Arthur who’s already wide awake and watching Eames with his knuckles bone-white against the armrest, as if somewhere just under those tucked in corners he’s thrashing with the need to reach out and sink his fingers into Eames, make sure his flesh and bones are all accounted for. Arthur who’s not shot through the heart, bruised, or run down, just beautiful and aggressively, stubbornly alive, and Eames digs out his poker chip, rubs at the engraving until his hands stop shaking.

A man of his word, Saito makes his phone call as soon as Fischer wakes up. Eames clears immigration without a problem, the demarcations etched out savagely by Mal’s death finally dissolving like lines in the sand.

Yusuf meets his eyes at baggage claim for a second before vanishing into the crowd, probably to catch the next flight back to Mombasa because, for a criminal and a genius, he’s astonishingly boring and predictable, though Eames suspects the stuff he gets up to in his dream den is considerably more exciting than he lets on.

An hour later Eames is leaned against the watchtower in Little Tokyo, admiring an old unassuming man peddling his wares with the stealth of an assassin, cloaking his endgame in humble nods and wan smiles.

“Is L.A. just as obnoxious as you remember it?”

He turns to his right and Arthur’s there, mouth twitching at his own humor, jacket-less, tie-less, shirt unbuttoned down to the hollow of his throat, and Eames suddenly feels starved, a splitting ache up and down the length of him that for once doesn’t feel impossible.

“Worse,” he concludes, reaching out to pull Arthur in by the wrist then the hips, grasping and greedy. “But there’s something perversely satisfying about poor urban planning and the atrociously wealthy that keeps me coming back for more. Ours is a torrid affair.”

Arthur watches for him a moment, quiet, considering, palm shifting along his spine, before saying, “You look different. You look like – ,” and then suddenly shifting gears to, “Remember the time we bought fireworks so you could set them off for the kids in the backyard? From that shop that was sketchy as hell but you insisted it was fine, and then it wasn’t fucking fine because one of them almost set the house on fire. Dom looked like he wanted to shove an explosive down your throat, but then Mal started laughing. She laughed so hard tears were running down her face and you just couldn’t help laughing with her.”

It sounds completely tangential to his initial point, but Eames knows it’s not. It makes him think, not about what’s gone but about everything that’s survived, and he says, closing that last inch of space between them so there’s no more room left for ghosts: “I remember.”

**Author's Note:**

> As always, [my Tumblr](http://scribblscrabbl.tumblr.com)!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [roads like wine, and desires like water](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4971214) by [beili](https://archiveofourown.org/users/beili/pseuds/beili)




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